Should the 'ancient' library be moved to ocaml-community?

Community
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http://git.annexia.org/?p=ocaml-ancient.git;a=summary

I am interested in it as a shared memory backend for parallel programming libraries (like parany).

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Given the fact that the library was downloaded 18 times last month (thus indicating low use) I would say no, since that puts up more burden on ocaml-community. I’d rather have popular libraries there than a dumping ground of all kinds of unmaintained code. But I’m sure the author of would appreciate help with maintenance!

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On the other hand, I think that Ancient is a useful tool in the OCaml ecosystem. Its low profile and lack of communication has prevented its use in scenarios where it may have been useful, and may have lead to a partial reinvention of its ideas and duplication of work. I think we should ask for the opinion of people who had a use for Ancient or similar technology before making a choice.

( @let-def ? )

3 Likes
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I indeed have a “reinvention” of Ancient around with a few different design choices. I might be able to release the sources, I have to check.

2 Likes
5

I was planning to use ancient, or a revived version of it, as the shared memory
backend for parany:


I would like to get away from ocamlnet and manually manage semaphores.

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By the way, I have asked Richard Jones by e-mail about transferring ancient to ocaml-community, but did not get an answer yet.

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So far, the projects transferred to ocaml-community (with one exception) have been projects that are widely used and that I’ve heard of before. That one exception has been a bit of a problem. If we were to transfer this, it would be good to know that someone was committed to keep working on it.

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Maybe a good first step to give more visibility to Ancient would be to add it to awesome ocaml.

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Submit a pull request! @rizo moved it to ocaml-community recently.

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@let-def can you release your “reinvention” of ancient?
Do you think it would be fine for the use case I mentioned?

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I am trying to revive it:


It compiles with ocaml-4.06.1 now.
I have no knowledge of compiler and GC internals, so any help in maintaining
this library is welcome.
I will use it intensively soon.

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@UnixJunkie Have you written to Richard Jones, who wrote the library? He may be willing to co-maintain it.

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Yep! I e-mailed him.